Radial Symmetry

My work conference ended yesterday, and thank god. Pretty much everyone who was working it cried during the closing plenary, when the board president thanked us for working our asses off to put it on even though things have been a shit storm funding mess here since April, really.

So my days were crazy exhausting days full of bad hotel food, bad hotel air, unsolvable technical riddles, and lots of talking to people. My evenings and mornings and occasional breaks were full of the loveliness of D.Jack, who I'd invited to come hang out with me.

It was a brilliant idea, I have to tell you, because without him there, I would have been dreading the whole thing. With him there, I could tread water through the endless useless Skype conversations with our techie (who tried his best) to get to the fun parts.

Now, back to reality, back to regular work, thank christ, with a contract and everything.

And back to National Novel Writing Month. Not that I was ever there to start, not like Zoom and her thousands of words (go Rosemary go!), because I have been and still am, wrung out.

I don't feel creative at all and I have no plot.

But I do have an opening scene and a general question I'd like to explore.

So. Tonight it is. In I dive and we'll see what happens.

To keep myself going, I'm going to post what I write every day - without editing, mind - to a new blogspot: Start Here Tomorrow.

I don't promise it'll be good, but I do promise it'll be there. Encouraging comments very very very welcome.

The first time I did that, I was still dating my ex, but we had stopped living together - a period that lasted 6 months 4 years ago. I had just finished mixing the banana stuff together for cookies, was cleaning the blade and had my thumb on the on button. I pressed the on button by mistake when my finger was in the way.

It cut through the nail, fairly deeply, though I didn't know that at first because there was a lot of fucking blood. And my brain had gone blank from the pain that was such a shock I couldn't feel it in my finger.

So what do you do when you're alone, and you're bleeding a fair amount, you have no bandages or first aid gear and you're insensible from pain?

You call your mommy.

To be fair, my mommy is a nurse. So it's like calling TeleHealth Ontario except with more maternal sympathy. Except that my brother, who is very nice but not a nurse, had my mother's phone.

"Hello?"

"Um... Mom?

"Meg? Hey! How are you?"

"Dave? Is Mom there? Why do you have her phone?"

"No she's babysitting."

"I need to talk to her. I cut my finger really badly and I don't know what to do. It's bleeding a lot."

"Hold it above your head?"

Eventually, I walked the couple blocks over to where my ex was working and used a bandaid from their first aid kit. And then I went home and slept.

I didn't lose the nail, but I did come away with a small warning scar.

++

This time felt the same. The blade hits and it doesn't really hurt, it's just this weird thunk. And then I hear myself yell - this time "I did it again!" - and then there is a sensation of extreme heat, followed swiftly by extreme cold, followed by a short period where you pull into yourself and it's purpley dark and the horizon is very flat and wide.

People keep asking me how it happened. The last time, I had a reasonable story. I wasn't paying attention and I fucked up. This time.

Yesterday morning, I got an email from that ex that I was dating but not living with regarding the interview for the article I'm writing. It was a neutral email, required a short reply, which I sent off just before getting up to clean smoothie remnants off the immersion blender.

I turned the water on, pressed my thumb into the button and ran the blades under the water. My ex in my head, I thought "Man, can you imagine if that happened again? And with all this writing to do? And the conference my work is putting on? That would fucking suck."

And then I have a vague memory of thinking "There's a bit of schmutz on the outside there, it'll come off with my nail, maybe." And like a far off sound, like someone in the back of the room under layers of white noise, there is a tiny tinny voice saying "You should put your finger in the blender."

Then there is a blank 30 seconds.

Then blood, and heat and cold and purpley dark.

I'm not entirely sure what to think about the whole thing. I mean, obviously, I did it on purpose. Or not me, not the core part that knows how to keep all my parts safe and manages generally well. But it's somewhat disturbing that the part of me that wants to step in front of moving vehicles managed to take over long enough to get an oft-used part of my body sliced up pretty good.

I'll put it down to stress and remembering; try not to lose too much trust in myself.

Steve mailed a few days ago and mentioned that I sounded kind of wan. I just wanted to take a moment to rectify that, in case others of you out there are thinking the same thing.

My life is a bit strange right now.

On the one hand, there's all this stuff I have to do. My work is putting on a conference starting this weekend. If you or your work has ever put on a conference, you know that it's a lot of details based on a lot of people who change those details on a seemingly regular basis in a way that is very difficult and frustrating to track. It is super stressful.

I've also got two writing assignments due in early November, which means getting them done by the 31st. Also super stressful, though more fun and satisfying.

And then, Halloween, though fun, is ill-timed this year. Apparently my work doesn't get that Halloween is the GAY XMAS and so I have to have a good costume and go to a party full of cute girls in their costumes. (A word of advice? If you are over 30, you should avoid American Apparel during the week leading up to Halloween.) So it will be a quiet and not drunken GAY XMAS for me. That, oddly for GAY XMAS perhaps, ends with me picking up my man-beau at another party. Because apparently Halloween is also INDIE ROCK XMAS.

This leads me to the other hand.

I have to tell you, and no one is more surprised than I am, that this dating business seems to be going remarkably well. I am, dare I say it, happy. If I were still the gushing kind, I might even have added some superlatives to that. Suffice it to say that I leave my office after a hairy day of "What the fuck now?" and on the short walk home, I find myself looking up at the grey sky and smiling for no good reason.

You know, it's just really nice to feel like that. I'm grateful for it.

Not much in the tank for you, dahlinks; a busy week at work and socializing and interviewing for articles has left me feeling a little worn thin. The weather, too, isn't helping. So grey and damp. Though today is warm and that was soothing when Chris and I left for breakfast this morning.

One of the interviews I did was with an ex of mine. When the editor contacted me to do the story, I was surprised and amused. My initial reaction was something along the lines of fuck no. The break up went, shall we say, not so smoothly. It involved me threatening to talk to the police and then, much later, courts and lawyers and bitter recriminations.

Which makes a good, though unbloggable, story.

But then I waffled. I have said a lot of terrible things about that ex, both in private and in public; much of it justified, some of it not. What I was being asked to write about - his musical talent, essentially - was something that was only a problem between us in that I found it very hard to leave, for a variety of reasons.

I knew I could write generously and honestly about pretty much any creative project that he was involved in. I thought it might be good for me to say something nice.

But I didn't really think it through.

The interview went well even though the last time we saw each other in person, it was incredibly angry: with righteous tight-jawed silence on my part, and verbal outbursts on his that I left the judge to deal with. This time there was a group of us, there was something other than the dead horse of our relationship to talk about, there guinness and laughter. I even drove him home after, and we talked only slightly awkwardly of mundane things.

So I'm feeling good about him, good as in settled, good as in, you know, he's not that bad a guy. I remembered that he is interesting and funny and one of the most genuine people I've ever met. In the nearly 4 years since we split, I have sometimes looked at the sum total of what I got out of that relationship and wondered how I could have wasted 4 years of my life with him (as I'm sure he did too). This finally put that to rest. I loved him for good reason. Just too long.

And then I started listening to the recording.

Have you ever transcribed anything? If you have, you're probably already cringing. If you haven't, I will tell you that it means listening to a recording in little loops. You'll get a chunk of words typed out, flip back a bit, listen forwards, get another chunk, flip back again. It can take up to double the amount of time. And that's with a good recording.

The one I got is pretty lousy. By the end of the second time through, just to remember what we'd said and pick out the parts I had to listen to closely, I was nearly out of my skin with irritation. Even though what he's saying is perfectly intelligent and interesting, the intonation, the verbal tics, the laugh. All the same as four years ago. So it was a good interview and I'll have plenty nice to say in the article, but man. Oh man.

Like every blogger I know, I have a statcounter. I love it. It lets me know how people find me, how many people are checking, how often some of those people check, what they look for once they get to me.

I can sometimes tell who's checking (like if you're the one person I know who works in any given government department), but mostly I can't. My anonymous regulars come to feel a bit like friends. Or maybe like that nice looking person you see walking to work every morning, rocking out to their ipod. A comforting touchstone.

So I miss the mue when it's not there. I love that Canadian Heritage calls their server "beaver" and that the justice department calls theirs "stop.justice."

What I love most is watching how people find me. My name is by far the most popular, which is good, if not particularly interesting. "What's biting me" is a perennial favourite; any variation on "hand job" is always up there, though currently the best one of those is "underpants handjob."

My most favourite recent one is "19 year old girls getting their mouths cleaned out by animals."

At first, I just guffawed. Because that is fucking specific, dude. Not 20 year olds?

I feel almost bad for this person, because it's obviously sexual - Chris' take is that it's a euphemism for giving animals head. How likely is this person to get that itch scratched? Not bloody likely, would be my guess, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's probably for the best.

It makes me feel lucky that my own desires are so pedestrian and reasonably easily satisfied.

The excellence started before midnight, actually, but carried over into the wee hours. The nervous making email I sent off a few days ago was an email to D.Jack, in which I laid out what was going on in my head and heart. I thought there was a decent chance it would be well received, but there was enough doubt that I did not get very much sleep. The decent chance, I'm more than happy to report, was much much better than that.

Which means I did not get very much sleep.

When you do not get very much sleep, 6.30 am rolls around even faster than normal. But I hauled myself into the shower, got dressed up in my office drag and headed off to the wrap-up meeting for a work project. I met my boss there and drank too much coffee and fruit that tasted of onion. All went well, so I was glad about that, not to mention being in a too-tired dreamy happy good mood to start. As we were cleaning up, my boss got the call.

The letter of understanding was in from our funder. I had a job.

Not that I was ever without one, but my last day was rolling around with alarming speed, and the thing about a house is that it's expensive. And also, if you have been looking for a job in Ottawa in the last little while, you will know that there's not a shit ton out there.

On the way back from the meeting, we hit the LCBO and the bakery. When everyone who was away assembled again, we gathered in the board room and called the people whose last days had already come and gone. None of them were home, but we left happy cheering messages for them.

That, I will tell you, is already a fucking good day. I am lucky to report that there's more.

At around 6 pm, I headed off to the airport to pick up one Chris from Winnipeg. Chris and I have been friends now for 10 years. One decade! We met in the third week of library school, and spent nearly every damn spare minute we had together for about 20 months. Since then, we've visited back and forth, though she has been far more back than I have been forth.

On her way here, she was sitting beside this bear hunter guy, and they got talking about far away friends and keeping in touch and he said "How long does it take you to get used to seeing each other again?" And she said "No time."

It's true, every time we see each other, it's like she just walked the four blocks up North Street from Gottingen to pop in. Though usually an hour or so in, one of us almost always says "It's so strange that it's so normal! It's so great!"

By chance today, I ran into Janey on the street. We rarely see each other in real life, though it turns out she lives about 5 short blocks away from me.

We talked only briefly, it being jesus cold outside and both of us on our way somewhere else. About the fifth thing she said to me was "National Novel Writing Month! You should do it!"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm pretty sure I'm going to. Not so sure that I've signed up or anything, you know."

Well. Now I can say I am that sure.

The title of the post is pulled from the email right after. I'm not so great with imperfection, so I've started seeing NaNoWriMo as just as much an opportunity to push myself on that as to get a novel written. Either way, in that case, it's a winning proposition.

++

It's been a bit of a day. About 30 seconds before signing up for NaNoWriMo, I sent off a nervous-making email. Several hours before that, I cried in the Bridgehead while J. and I were having warm beverages. Having used her hanky to wipe up some spilled tea, she patted her pockets and said "If my hanky weren't already soaked, I would lend it to you!" and gave me a napkin instead. Now that's a good friend.

Other than that, the weekend's been lovely. Lots of warm beverages with good friends, an amusing trip to the Landsdowne Market, cranberry sauce, wine and more wine, dancing with d.jack, sun and hail and brisk air.

Oh, I am feeling so giddy and inspired right now. J. is probably at home writing her own blog post, possibly about how I grabbed her arm on the way out of Whip It and shook her hard and said "It was so fucking good. That. Was so. Awesome."

I want to round up every teenage girl I can find and make them watch this. I want to say to them "See, look at how great it is to love something and get good at it. See how that totally cool looking guy is just some dweeb? And look at how she's not going to just listen to his flagrantly stupid excuses. Look at how she's found this awesome family of women who love her."

And the acting is good and the story is tight and everyone looks hot, but kind of normal hot, at least for movie stars, and they dressed the 17 year old in reasonably modest clothing, which I totally appreciated.

All in all, it gets my vote. I might even watch it again. Which, from someone who sees about 6 movies a year, is high praise indeed.